Fowlkes: When it comes to MMA, what do you really know, and what does it matter?

Here’s a question I encourage you to answer honestly, removing your ego from the equation as best you can for a little serious self-appraisal. Nobody’s listening in. There will not be a test later. It’s just you and the glowing screen here, and I want you to tell the truth. Ready? OK, here goes: What do you really know about this mixed martial arts stuff? I mean, honestly.

Let me clarify here that I’m not asking what you can recite. I’m not asking how many years you’ve been following the sport or which obscure fights you can reference. For our purposes here, the person who only discovered this whole professional cagefighting thing when that Brock Lesnar guy did the reality show is as welcome in the discussion as the superfan who had floor seats at UFC 1. I’m asking what you really understand about it. I’m asking what, if anything, you think you know about what pro fighters do for a living.

I ask because recently I was sitting down in a hotel bar with “King” Mo Lawal and somehow we got started talking about fight fans – a subject of enduring interest for Lawal, even though he claims not to care about their opinions and encourages other fighters to do the same.

“All these people who think they know and who want to comment, they don’t know s—,” Lawal said at one point. “They don’t. They’re just going off what they read on message boards.”

That seemed ungenerous to me at first. Both on the Internet and in person, I feel like I’ve encountered some pretty educated, insightful fight fans. Despite all the blood and the testosterone (and the testosterone-replacement therapy), this sport seems to attract a certain kind of nerd, and one that I think generally understands more about the intricacies of MMA than NFL fans understand about the game of football.

Lawal himself is one such nerd, whether he wants to admit it or not. Here’s a guy whose idea of fun is sitting around with a laptop watching old MMA fights, boxing bouts or wrestling matches (both real and otherwise). You mention a fight from 2004, and he can reenact it blow-for-blow. He can tell you why Chael Sonnen’s takedowns are trickier than they look. He has strong opinions on topics such as women’s boxing and great wrestling tag teams 1990s. I don’t care how physically gifted you are, if you’re that obsessive about something – anything, whether it’s “Battlestar Galactica” or World War II – you are a nerd, possibly even a geek.

The point is, many MMA fans are the same variety of nerd, even if they log less gym time than Lawal. Some train in one or more of the martial arts, and some couldn’t complete a mile run. Some would rather lose a finger than miss a UFC prelim bout, and some just follow the big fighters in the big fights. But somewhere in there, doesn’t there have to be a subset of the fan population that actually knows what they’re talking about? Even if we disagree on what the percentage is, don’t there have to be some people who really, truly get it? And if not, wouldn’t that be really, really sad?

Because, whether he thinks they have the ability to appreciate his work or not, a guy like Lawal needs those fans. It’s their interest and their money that makes this a career rather than a hobby for him. Wouldn’t you want the people who are sustaining your existence to understand what it is they’re seeing? Whether they’re critical of you or not, wouldn’t that be less depressing than thinking of them as carnival rubes there to be entertained by something they can’t comprehend?

And yes, Lawal agreed, that would be a nicer way to think of it. It’s just that he doesn’t think it’s accurate, which is why he disregards fan opinion and encourages other fighters to do the same, he said.

“I remember after [Daniel] Cormier’s first fight,” he said. “I remember he went onto MMAjunkie.com, and he was like, ‘Man, people say I suck.’ I was like, ‘It’s your first fight! What do they know?’ And now look at him.”

But then, it’s easy to tar all fight fans with one ugly brush. A few obnoxious commenters among thousands of readers isn’t exactly a representative sample. And besides, it’s possible that Lawal’s own difficult relationship with fans colors his perception of them. You tell people they don’t know what they’re talking about, and they’re probably going to have some strong words for you in response, which in turn might only give you more reasons to want to ignore them.

So I put the question to Rich Franklin, who seems to have a very different relationship with fans. He’s far less antagonistic, a little more of an optimist, and has nowhere near the legion of haters that some other fighters seem to inspire. If you’re Michael Bisping or Josh Koscheck, and fans have more vitriol for you than anything else, of course you want to tell yourself that they have no clue what they’re talking about. But what if you’re Franklin, who has far more fans than haters? Does he think those people are capable of really understanding this sport, and his work in it?

“Absolutely not,” he said before I could even finish the question. “That would be about as ridiculous as me saying that I understand what you do for a living because I’ve posted a few articles on my website.”

The difference is, Franklin doesn’t see it as a problem that’s unique to fighters and fans. He sees it as the essential disconnect between anyone in any profession and all the people watching it from the outside.

“It has nothing to do with arrogance as a professional fighter and thinking that no one knows what I go through,” Franklin said. “It’s not that. But I was a teacher before I became a fighter. People think they know what it’s like to be a teacher, but they don’t know until they’ve spent a year in a classroom and have seen how difficult it is to control a high school classroom. That analogy can carry across the board for any profession.”

And yet, Franklin added, “That doesn’t mean I have a lack of appreciation for fans, just because they don’t understand it. Heck, I’m an armchair quarterback for the NFL on Sundays. Do I have any idea how hard it is to play in the NFL? No, but I bet it’s really hard, physically and mentally. That’s what makes me a fan. I can appreciate watching it and appreciate what they go through, but I still don’t know what it’s like to actually go through it.”

Which brings us back to you, the fan, and also to us, the media. What do we really know about this? Maybe you’ve trained or even had a couple fights. Maybe we’ve done a bunch of interviews and sat through a bunch of sparring sessions. What insight does any of that really give us into what it’s like to fight for a living? And, if it turns out that we can’t possibly understand it from where we’re sitting, what does that mean about our ability to appreciate it and offer an intelligent opinion on it?

After all, if we limit ourselves to only those topics that we have personal experience with, our conversations would get boring in a hurry. Those of us who have not directed a feature-length film would be unable to criticize any movie ever. Those of us who have not served in Congress could offer no opinion on how our nation is being run. Imagine sports bars full of people watching football in dreary silence. Picture people with no musical ability whatsoever listening to a band that they lack the authority and technical knowledge to either love or hate. I don’t think this is a world any of us really wants to live in.

We talk about things that we have no personal experience with all the time, so we are probably talking about things we don’t truly understand, or at least things we don’t understand on the same level as the people we’re talking about.

Does it matter? Seems like it should, in some way. Seems like we should at least acknowledge that this is what we’re doing every once in a while, that we don’t know as much as we think we do, and that our opinions on it are formed from very far away. Seems like that would be healthy, just as an occasional reminder. Then we can go right back to talking about the things we don’t really understand since the depressing alternative is not talking to each other very much at all.

As the UFC 189 tour made its last stop in Dublin, featherweight champ Jose Aldo was met with a torrent of abuse from the Irish fans. It might have been unpleasant, but it might also have been just what he needed.